Roadmaps
Metamaterials Roadmaps
The UK Metamaterials Network (UKMMN) welcomes the roadmaps written by expert members of the community reflecting on the six special interest group areas covered by the metamaterials community in the UK: 1) Active Metamaterials; 2) Acoustic Metamaterials 3) Mechanical Metamaterials; 4) Photonic Metamaterials; 5) Theory, Modelling & AI; and 6) Wireless & Microwave Metamaterials (now Microwave & THz) as well as the roadmap on Manufacturing and Scale-Up. These roadmaps represent a titanic effort by the community to draw together the key challenges and opportunities across the many domains represented within metamaterials research across the UK.
The Metamaterial Roadmaps – Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics – IOPscience
Acoustic Metamaterials Roadmap (Accepted Manuscript)
Chaplain et al 2025 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6463/add306
Today, acoustic metamaterials form a core area of metamaterial research. They offer bespoke wave control, achievable through their rationally designed structure and are at the forefront of metamaterial applications and commercialisation. They find purpose across science and defence sectors in wave filtering, sensing, communications, energy harvesting, thermal emission control, and aeroacoustics, to name but a few. They enjoy success in metropolitan environments with designer audio and noise mitigation falling within their remit; acoustic metamaterial technologies are already penetrating the market across audio and healthcare sectors.
The landscape of acoustic metamaterial research is continually expanding, now incorporating several wave regimes under a broader definition that we adopt here. The diversity of acoustic metamaterial research displays how they exist not only to translate electromagnetic phenomena, but also to provide a unique platform for exploring all metamaterial physics, and for solving key societal challenges.
The aim of this Roadmap is to present a summary of the state of acoustic metamaterial research and innovation in 2024, with opinions on the challenges and future opportunities from a group of renowned experts, covering key interdisciplinary areas from fundamental acoustics to device implementation.
Active Metamaterials Roadmap
See Simon Pope, Diane Roth et al, ‘The 2026 Active Metamaterials Roadmap.’ (2026).
Active metamaterials are engineered structures that possess novel properties that can be changed after the point of manufacture. Their novel properties arise predominantly from their physical structure, as opposed to their chemical composition and can be changed through means such as direct energy addition into wave paths, or physically changing/morphing the structure in response to both a user or environmental input.
Active metamaterials are currently of wide interest to the physics community and encompass a range of sub-domains in applied physics (e.g. photonic, microwave, acoustic, mechanical, etc.). They possess the potential to provide solutions that are more suitable to specific applications, or which allow novel properties to be produced which cannot be achieved with passive metamaterials, such as time-varying or gain enhancement effects. They have the potential to help solve some of the important current and future problems faced by the advancement of modern society, such as achieving net-zero, sustainability, healthcare and equality goals. Despite their huge potential, the added complexity of their design and operation, compared to passive metamaterials creates challenges to the advancement of the field, particularly beyond theoretical and lab-based experiments.
This roadmap brings together experts in all types of active metamaterials and across a wide range of areas of applied physics. The objective is to provide an overview of the current state of the art and the associated current/future challenges, with the hope that the required advances identified create a roadmap for the future advancement and application of this field.
Manufacturing & Scale-up Roadmap
Pending publication.
Over the past decades, significant advancements in manufacturing techniques have enabled the realisation of various types of metamaterials, ranging from conventional methods such as subtractive and formative manufacturing to disruptive approaches like additive manufacturing. This roadmap explores the current-state-of-the art manufacturing techniques for metamaterials, highlighting key challenges and opportunities in scaling up production and commercialisation. Structured around three metamaterial categories – mechanical, electromagnetic and acoustic – and three manufacturing approaches –additive, subtractive and formative – this roadmap presents insights from leading experts on the future of metamaterial fabrication, offering perspectives on overcoming barriers to large-scale implementation.
Mechanical Metamaterials Roadmap
Pending publication.
The mechanical metamaterials roadmap will cover the various core types of mechanical metamaterial, ordered by their anomalous properties. With the large volume of work to date focussing on auxetic (negative Poisson’s ratio) mechanical metamaterials, this property is split into five sections (each with different authors). A final section will summarise current and potential application areas, using current products as case studies showing requirements for industry uptakes. The roadmap will be edited by Prof Alderson, Dr Duncan, and Dr Dias.
- Negative Poisson’s ratio
- Cellular solids
- Textiles
- Composites
- Polymers
- Nano/molecular and miniaturisation
- Natural and Bioinspired Mechanical Metamaterials
- Flexible and Shape Morphing Mechanical Metamaterials
- Negative Stiffness/Compressibility
- Negative Thermal Expansion
- Applications
Microwave & Wireless Metamaterials Roadmap
See, Stephen D Henthorn, Qammer H Abbasi, and Akram Alomainy et al, ‘Roadmap on Microwave and Wireless Metasurfaces’.
The Microwave & Wireless metasurfaces roadmap brings together expertise from academia, industry and government to outline an exciting period of development in the field as metamaterial products become increasingly present in the market. The authors attribute this change to telecommunications and the development of steerable antennas for satellite communications. Furthermore, as the authors note, ‘since 2019 there has been an explosion of interest in metasurfaces from the wireless communications theory community due to the concept of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces […] which can vary the reflected phase from many independently controlled elements, enabling some control of the wireless propagation channel.’
The authors have identified some remaining scientific challenges, such as the fundamental bandwidth limitations of metamaterials due to their resonant behaviour; that metamaterial behaviour is often heavily contingent on the incident angle of the electromagnetic wave to the material; and the difficulties of reconfigurability, particularly at higher frequencies. The authors also identify practical challenges in environments such as healthcare, and defence, where the metamaterials need to maintain their performance, despite vulnerability to variations in conditions. The greatest challenge identified is the integration of metamaterials into products and systems.
The roadmap looks towards solutions to these problems, and the authors have highlighted opportunities such as Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Additive manufacturing (although the latter poses difficulties in scale-up). The authors point out that an alternative and more scalable approach is the integration of metamaterial fabrication into existing mass production methods, such as roll-to-roll processing.
Theory, Modelling & AI Roadmap
See Bryn Davies, Stefan Szyniszewski et al, ‘Roadmap on metamaterial theory, modelling and design’, J. Phys. D: Applied Physics, 58 (2025)
The growth of metamaterial science has brought to the fore the power of micro-structuring materials to achieve previously unattainable properties. Metamaterial-based breakthroughs have had wide-ranging technological implications, including realising materials with effectively negative material parameters, allowing for design freedoms such as the ability to finely tune highly anisotropic properties or practical considerations such as being able to greatly reduce mass. However, the often complex and many-degree-of-freedom nature of the small-scale geometries that have facilitated these breakthroughs come with associated challenges. Traditional direct numerical simulations can incur significant computational costs (due to the need to use very fine meshes). This, combined with the high-dimensional associated parameter spaces, can render design problems computationally intractable. As a result, researchers have developed a variety of strategies to characterise metamaterials’ properties, seeking approaches that greatly simplify problems while still capturing the material’s key features.
Photonic Metamaterials Roadmap
The authors of the Photonics Roadmap present the case for the relevance and potential of the swiftly developing field of metasurfaces in optics. This flourishing field touches on an astoundingly wide range of applications. The ‘metasurfaces’ gain their properties from not only their constituent materials, but from the shape and arrangement of the ‘meta-atoms’ which form them on a nanoscopic scale. This allows for complex designs, with multifarious properties and importantly metasurface technology offers flat optical components with great flexibility. The advances common across the articles included in the roadmap emphasise that the advantages of the technology include the reduction of bulk, and improvements in efficiency and sustainability.
This roadmap is the culmination of a world-wide effort by leading experts on metasurfaces and will provide readers with an up-to-date reference of the current status, understanding, and direction of photonic metasurface research.
Other News
UKMMN Newsletter September 2026 (external link)
